Hacker News Reader

> Do such jobs now involve constant meetings and trainings about whatever hot topic HR is working on...

If you have a manual labor job, the opportunity to be paid to sit down while someone yammers on about something or other and maybe shows a movie is quite welcome.

Eh, I think that depends on whether that manual job is self employed or working for someone else.

If there is no work to do, I'd rather go home and watch a movie of my choosing, or anything else I feel like doing. Idle time at work is excruciating.

Idle time is nice if the alternative is heavy lifting or dealing with rude customers

When it is at home, yes. When someone wants to take up your time at work that could be instead spent getting the job done so you can go home, or already be at home, it is not a pleasant experience.

If you get the current task at hand done, you're not going home. You're paid by the hour (in this case)

> rude customers

Dealing with rude customers is quickly learned.

The stuff around internal politics though - little pecking order shit, where the managers and other coworkers can and often do make working unbearable causes many exits and often violence.

> Dealing with rude customers is quickly learned.

No, it's not, many workers I know face repeated and regular stressful abuse, which is almost always worse if they are visibly part of a marginalized group of people, who also get racial and misogynistic slurs thrown in their face. There are dramatic differences in treatment, and many managers don't step in to protect their employees. That's not to say the other stuff you mention doesn't also occur.

It's not even necessarily retail, I know a really sweet Latina woman, she manages and runs multiple bicycle rental places in SF. People will be incredibly rude to her, but when she says, "Hold on, let me get someone else to help you" and gets a white male employee of hers, they are suddenly all smiles and apologetic and understanding.

I honestly would encourage folks here to remember to be good customers, to treat workers as you would want people to treat you, because workers in the US are almost always underpaid and dealing with work related stress.

Try to know what you want by looking online, understand that workers don't owe you happy smiles and social interaction beyond the goods and services you pay for, listen to and ask for suggestions and consider them as expert advice if you are having trouble making a decision, and if possible be polite and say thank you.

If she is the manager and has a staff why is she working the front counter?

I've never seen a manager hand off a difficult customer to a lower employee. As a customer I would ask to speak to the manager if I wasn't getting service never does the manager ask the co-op student to handle this difficult customer they can't.

Something about your story doesn't add up. You say she is the nicest person but is she good at customer service because those are two different skills.

Ah, you are reasoning from your own anecdotal experience to say that something is unlikely because you haven't yourself observed it.

Maybe you should try an experiment?

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-happened-when-a-man-sign...

That experiment from her perspective.

https://nickyknacks.medium.com/working-while-female-59a5de3a...

I do post under various genders / ages / races and the advantages of being part of each identity are not shared between groups.

There are advantages to being female or black or old or young or male depending on who you are talking to.

It is eye opening.

>Dealing with rude customers is quickly learned. >The stuff around internal politics though... can and often do make working unbearable

I'll go out on a limb here and say you have never worked in a retail job before, dealing with the general public. A small percentage of the public are simply fucking awful people who will do absolute anything they can to try and get what they want.

Surprise surprise, dealing with this form of abuse (and more importantly, never knowing when it's coming) on a daily basis destroys your mental health - just as dealing with abusive behaviours from a spouse or parent does.

Businesses should not tolerate this, but they do, because it increases their revenue by a couple of percentage points.

I've worked several customer service jobs and helped many people navigate dealing with customers on a frontline. It can be learned and taught. I'm not saying, "the customer is always right", but negotiation - even on the fly negotiation is a skill that anyone can learn.

I've worked plenty of those kinds of jobs over the years.

Your opinion is the minority, a sizeable one but obviously the minority. The opinion of the person you're replying to is the majority.

Nobody wants to hang around and do nothing at work, even if you're getting paid. If the job is done people want to go home and sit on their ass on their own terms.

You're saying you've never wanted an occasional 1 hr break during a work day?

One hour breaks are always welcome, but one hour tasks that require watching someone go out of their way to bore you is the furthest thing from a break.

And while they might be tolerable when done occasionally, in the age of Agile all the things, where even restaurant staff are now hosting daily standups, those meetings are not occasional.

>Your opinion is the minority, a sizeable one but obviously the minority. The opinion of the person you're replying to is the majority.

As someone who's apparently in the minority, what's the evidence of this? Is this just your self-assessment?

Anecdatum: slow days at the warehouse were brutal. The busier we were, the faster time flew. Nothing was as dreadful as sitting around waiting for an order to pick, staring at the clock waiting for lunch or the shift to be over.

Many people are more fulfilled when their skills are utilized than when they have to space out while the talentless are allowed to spew jargon that won't actually change anything.

We're talking about unskilled jobs where you aren't allowed to pee when you choose.

If you're paid by the hour then you get money by sitting around in meetings, but not by going home and watching a movie.

Just because the company only values your time at X an hour, doesn't mean you're content wasting that time for X an hour. Idle time at my old minimum(ish) wage jobs when I was younger was honestly the biggest stressor I had. When we were busy, time flew, it was no big deal. But sitting around idle, that same hour drags on, and can be a real drain on mental health. Especially if you're going to school or something and have better ways to spend that time, but due to the work environment, you can't spend that time accordingly for whatever reason.

Sure, pay is pay, but time is more valuable than any job can afford to be honest, and few things let that reality sink in as much as idle time at a job you hate, but you have to stay and deal with it because you're struggling to make ends meet.

But you could be working during that time, giving at least some stimulation and sense of accomplishment. Listening to someone drone on about nothing you care about only serves to remind you that you could instead be doing something productive with your time.

Only if it came at the right time. I had to watch several anti-union videos when I started working at a grocery store. I'd already watched other training videos that day and the anti-union arguments in the video were insulting to my intelligence. I'd rather have been stocking shelves than listen to that garbage but I'm sure there were times where I'd been working a long shift (side note: 32 hours was the longest shift I ever worked) and would have been fine with watching some random HR video, insulting or not.

This kind of "training" is frequently framed as being about "ethics". It's confusing until you realize what's being done with the word "ethics".

I remember the first time I received on-the-job grocery training when I put myself through college working the night shift at the grocery store.

It was 3 weeks before I graduated from college. I had to drive to another town and sit through 3 hours of presentations on how to do the basic things that I had been training other employees to do for years.

One of the big ones is credit cards/rewards programs. When I worked at target all cashiers had to maintain a certainppercentage of rewards program customers going through their line

> From personal experience, the hardest part of an office job is putting up with all the conformity and bureaucracy and politics.

Sorry, but this is just a staggeringly awful FirstWorldProblems/Karen kind of thing. I mean, sure, maybe that's the worst part of your "office job" (which I'm guessing is, like many people here, a six figure development position in a career you genuinely enjoy), but you say that because you've never had to be on your feet for 8 hours straight bagging groceries or emptying trash cans or entering orders from cranky customers into a POS terminal.

Good grief. Bad training meetings are what you choose to complain about? Really?

From the comment you are replying to: > when I worked at a grocery store

You: > you've never had to be on your feet for 8 hours straight bagging groceries

You don’t know that, and the evidence we have implies you are quite possibly wrong.

I used to do dishes, drive thru, kitchen, and floors at a Chic-Fil-A for well under $10 an hour in 2003-2005. I now make well over 100k.

Person you're replying to is the definition of a techie in his or her own bubble.

When I was fourteen I spent two or three years working at a place that gave refunds for recyclables in the bad area of town. I spent eight hours straight on my feet counting bottles and cans that were quite often picked from the garbage, and frequently had dead mice, broken glass, exposed needles, or other biohazards in them. I was _excited_ when I got the opportunity to mop the floor. Even when I had a couple days off, the smell of sour milk would always be in my nose. I got paid something like $6/hr USD at the time.

Quit your whining about your cushy fast food job making almost twice as much, you don't even know what hard work is. /s

It doesn't matter if other people have it worse. That's still something that sucks in that guys life, and the fact that other people have it worse doesn't make him feel better or invalidate how he feels about it.

That was my point. Even people with good jobs can complain about work and their feelings are valid. Don't get why I'm getting down voted.

Sometimes I wish that this "Karen" meme didn't exist. It ruined a perfectly good name.

Losing one name of middling popularity seems like a fair tradeoff for now having a good succinct way to describe upper middle class entitlement.

There were plenty of racist words to use before "Karen".

What bugs me the most is that all the Karens I know are nice people, who don't deserve having their name thrown into the mud.

It's always easy to impose sacrifices on others to further one's own agenda.

Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: "Bro, you don't work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver."

They have a point. Mordor sucks, and it's certainly more physically taxing to dig a tunnel than poke at a keyboard unless you're an ant.

Fwiw, when I worked a crappy retail job and was on my feet 8 hours straight, I despised pointless meetings and training and would have rather been sweating while hauling boxes or cleaning the store toilet.